Posted
by
timothyon Sunday February 12, 2012 @07:33PM
from the great-cycle-of-nature dept.

angry tapir writes "Crowd-funding website Crowdtilt officially launched last week, expanding upon the collective fundraising model pioneered by Kickstarter to enable raising money for any project — even a beer blitz. Like Kickstarter, Crowdtilt allows users to create a fundraising campaign with a tipping point. If the effort falls short of the set amount, would-be donors are not charged. However, unlike Kickstarter, the platform allows users to "group fund anything." Users can initiate campaigns without first getting the approval of service administrators, which they must do on Kickstarter."

I wish they'd improve on the way Kickstarter organizes the projects. I tried one a year ago and after two days my linked web site hadn't received a single hit. I wanted to wait a couple of days as an experiment to see what traffic Kickstarter itself generated before I started driving traffic myself. I checked the Kickstarter web site and I couldn't find my own project. I finally found it buried half a dozen pages deep in this generic new projects section and no where else. Basically it took some real digging to find it. The site is organized like iTunes. The favored projects get fronted and everything is buried with no hope of getting funded. I found it annoying since all they were contributing was hosting for their cut and if anything they were working against the vast majority of projects so they could focus funding sources for favored ones. After two days I halted the project and never tried again. The point is unless you personally can drive enough traffic to your project it has no chance and 90% of more of the projects posted are never given a fair chance. All they are providing you with is the structure and nothing else. I thought the site was there to promote projects but it's not it's there to promote projects that they think have a chance of getting funded or that the people behind the site like. There seemed no rhyme or reason behind the selections because most were obviously popular but some never received any pledges yet they were deemed worthy of a named section. If a section says film or books it should contain ALL of the film or book projects not just the darling projects. Most won't bother to look past the named sections because they would assume that's all there is and why wouldn't they?

It's a good idea but like all things in life the insiders get the breaks and the deck is stacked against everyone else. Maybe this new site will do a better job and not become a source for the "in crowd" like Kickstarter turned into.

The point is unless you personally can drive enough traffic to your project it has no chance and 90% of more of the projects posted are never given a fair chance. All they are providing you with is the structure and nothing else. I thought the site was there to promote projects but it's not it's there to promote projects that they think have a chance of getting funded or that the people behind the site like.

This seemed really obvious from my research. Their business model is to promote projects that will bring new donors to their site, not yours.

I think the implications are a little more insidious. E-begging is one thing and there's nothing ethically wrong with that IMHO - at least people know you're just asking for cash to spend on yourself. But consider another possible scenario:

Step 1: Post fundraising goal of $x for some really good sounding (but fake) cause/project. ("My 2-year-old daughter has leukemia and I've been out of work for six months...")

Step 2: Wait for donations to accumulate

Step 3: If donations fail to reach tipping point, put your own money ($y) in until it does - causing third party donors to be charged and funds released.

Step 4: Vanish with ($x - $y) profit.

Get something going on Facebook and you'll have thousands of people chipping in $5 or whatever no questions asked. Granted this is possible for Kickstarter as well (would need a different cover story), but with having each donation drive screened you hopefully have some due diligence going on to verify their legitimacy. Maybe.=Smidge=